The progressive die industry is a pillar industry for automotive, consumer electronics, computer manufacture, etc. With the rapid changes of products in those industries, product companies need die and tooling capabilities with significantly shortened die tool lead time. Critical to the progressive die design is the ability to import a non-sheet metal filed into a CAD application, and then to be able to quickly convert it into a sheet-metal part for folding operations without any parameters from the original imported file. Once converted to a sheet-metal part, the user can then generate a flattened shape of a sheet metal part (or blank) and its intermediate states.
Unfolding of a sheet metal part is the first and most important step to design a progressive die. Unfolding methods vary based in part on different shapes of the sheet metal part. For example, for free-form sheet metal, one can make use of known CAE-FEM methods to perform unfolding. For a straight-break part, if it is an imported model or designed using generic features, one could convert it into sheet metal self-formable feature-based model. Known art includes the ability to re-build the part by using sheet metal features, another one is to re-build it automatically, the first method is very time-consuming and requires that a die designer have high sheet metal skill, other limitations exist where there are no “mapped” features.
What is needed is a numerical control arrangement not currently supported in the known prior art for direct sheet metal unfolding to support a bend neutral factor table and related fabrication thereof.